Vocations Spotlight: Fr Peter Wygnanski

As the Diocese of East Anglia continues to celebrate its 50th Jubilee Year, we are shining a spotlight on the people who live out their vocations in service to our diocesan family. Each month, we meet a member of our clergy or someone in formation, reflecting on their call, their ministry and their hopes for the future.

This month, we hear from Fr Peter Wygnanski, Private Secretary to Bishop Peter Collins and Catholic Chaplain to the University of East Anglia, who shares how his vocation first took shape, what inspires him in his ministry today, and why fostering vocations remains vital to the life of our diocese.

With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, the early signs of my vocation to the priesthood are visible in my youth as an altar server at St Laurence’s parish, Cambridge. However, it was only when at university that a quiet, vague, possibility of a calling to be a priest ’one day’ became something more serious. Getting to know seminarians at World Youth Day ‘08 in Sydney gave me awareness enough of the practical path to picture myself on it and opened the possibility of the the spiritual growth in that direction. For a number of years I would go to Taize, in France, where I started to learn what prayer really was, and I began to catch glimpses of the peace that comes in drawing close to God. Despite my best efforts, including pursuit of a career as both engineer and then musician, I could not escape the intuition in the depths of my heart that the spiritual peace I had found could not be replicated by anything else and so the yearning for that inner peace slowly became the force most determining my decisions and longings. In time, I became aware of the possibility that allowing myself to be shaped by the Holy Spirit might only be possible to the full within the life of a priest. It was in Taize that I first approached Bishop Michael Evans to surprise him by sharing a possible call to the priesthood. His words of advice and encouragement that evening support me even today.

My experience of the path, through long but happy years of discernment, formation, and now priesthood, learning to trust God’s plan for my life, has been a discovery of the offer of the life of the Resurrection. Sharing each day more and more in Jesus’ risen life, a life where grace makes me free for service of others, prayer, and worship of God, becomes a double blessing as, in particular in ministry with university students and young people, I can support others on the journey of discovering the treasure of that grace-filled life God wants to share with us all. I gave God thanks for this reality when I celebrated Mass in Christ’s empty tomb, at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and my devotion to the Resurrection is the air in my spiritual lungs and the vitality of the priestly ministry Jesus entrusts to me.

My hope is that, in the years to come, we can better encourage one another to think, not “what do I want to do”, but what is the service God is calling me to, as we share a conviction that God’s blessings for each of us come when we generously take our place in the story of His plan for humanity. Let us especially encourage our young people to be bold, to take the risk of following Jesus in ways that may, at first, seem daunting. There is nothing to be lost in seriously asking the question ‘What does God want me to do with my life’, and everything to be gained. Pope Benedict XVI would often say that world promises comfort, but God did not make us for comfort but for greatness: In East Anglia, the home of Our Lady of Walsingham, we have the perfect model of letting God’s life take flesh within us. Let us allow the pattern of Mary help us build communities centred on the Gospel where, as Pope Leo XIV has described, young people can hear and mature in the call to total gift of self. By our choice to cooperate with God’s plan in this way, we can all become springs of living water in a thirsting world. 

Photograph: Fr Peter Wygnanski outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.

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